Buzzfeed has certainly arrived at the right place at the right time, taking advantage of an increasingly social web and curating a huge proportion of the content we see everyday in our news feeds.

Buzzfeed has more than 150m unique views every month, 15m unique views in the UK with 75% of these coming from social and more than half coming from mobile.

The creative director of Buzzfeed Philip Byrne talked at our Festival of Marketing event yesterday about the success of Buzzfeed and also gave advice for brands that want to partner with the publisher.

Brands as publishers is a popular mantra, but what does it really mean? Does it also mean that publishers can become brands that sell stuff?

Digital disruption has not been kind to established publishers.

Firstly, circulation of print media has declined due to the rise of social media, the explosion of freely available commoditised content (particularly in the lucrative celebrity market, in which the Mail Online is causing major disruption) and the slowness of the economic recovery.

However as companies create more and more content in order to appeal to an ever-expanding range of customers and clients, the more internal and external obstacles they are faced with.

Although some companies have the budget to create their own content or outsource its production, the majority feel they don’t have the right organisation or internal structure to utilise the content properly. Retrieving the right content, promoting the content sufficiently and measuring its effectiveness are all major problems that companies are facing right now.

It doesn’t help that channels where content marketing has previously worked before, Facebook’s news feed for instance, are being tweaked to make it tougher for branded content to appear in front of a company’s own audience.

MSLGROUP has recently published a survey entitled Curing the Content Headache in which 100 communications professionals from complex global organisations were asked in April 2014 about the current state of their content marketing strategies.

In content strategy, people often focus on the most obvious part (the content creation) and don’t quite realise that there’s a lot more to it.

Content strategy is a big picture that is made up of four main ‘blocks’. A burger (content) can be quite nice, but on its own it’s just a meatloaf. You need the bun, the cheese and the sauce to make it really tasty.

These parts all work together, and are made up of smaller ‘ingredients’ to make the whole.

Surprisingly, nobody has yet created a periodic table for content marketing, so I thought I’d have a go.

Before I introduce it, allow me to doff my hat at Dmitri Mendeleev, who first published the periodic table of elements. I’ll also nod in the direction of Danny Sullivan, who created one based around SEO success factors.

Let me also say that I hope that this is helpful, as the world is awash with dubious infographics and I really didn’t want to produce something just for the sake of it.

The usual caveats apply: there will be obvious omissions, possibly duplicated symbols, and other schoolboy errors. I shall fix these things in a future iteration, so please raise a flag if you spot anything.

Ok then, let’s take a look at the table, and I’ll explain my thinking along the way…